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Growing up in this Andy Hardy world, Dole apparently never got in trouble; no one can remember him even pulling a Halloween trick. He was a solid student, but his real promise seemed to be as an athlete who went out for track, football and basketball. "He was a marvelous physical specimen," remembers Coach Elliott, "about 175-185 and six feet two, and he was a competitor. If you told him to climb a wall, he'd climb a wall." George Baxter, the football coach, recalls that Dole "never competed in the easy track events. He went in for the 440 and 880." An end on the football team, Dole won a big game for the Russell Broncos by making an impossible catch on the last play and slogging down a muddy field to score, while the opposing coach threw his hat to the ground in disgust and jumped up and down on it.
Dole was planning to become a doctor but, in 1943, he left the University of Kansas during his sophomore year and enlisted in the Army. On April 14, 1945, Dole—a 21-year-old second lieutenant—began leading an infantry platoon across the Po River in northern Italy. A burst of fire shattered his right shoulder and arm, damaged his left arm, broke five cervical vertebrae and destroyed a kidney. He lay for hours on the battlefield. "It was," he recalls, "'sort of a long day."
Dole spent the next 39 months in hospitals. At first he lay imprisoned in a neck-to-waist cast. When it turned out that he needed a special operation, Chet Dawson, his old boss in the drugstore, started a drive that raised $5,200 and sent him off to Chicago. Dole now has a right arm reconstructed in part from bone and muscle transplanted from his legs.
In 1948, near the end of his long and painful recovery, Dole met an occupational therapist named Phyllis Hoiden. Three months later, they were married. His wife still had to help tie his shoes and button his shirts when he enrolled in the University of Arizona. He graduated in 1949 with the help of credits he had accrued in the Army, the G.I. Bill, and his wife—who not only worked but also managed to take notes on his reading and write the exams that he dictated. In 1952 Dole got his law degree from Washburn University of Topeka.
In 1950, while still in law school, Dole was elected to a two-year term in the Kansas legislature—the first of eleven consecutive electoral victories. From 1953 to 1961 he served as Russell County attorney and developed his brisk, prosecutorial style. He was already a superb campaigner. In 1958 he had defeated Democrat Cliff Holland, who recalls how even his mother was converted into a fan by the eager and boyish charmer. Dole met Holland's mother once casually in a crowd, then 18 months later remembered her by name.
In 1960 Dole was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives by the thrifty, hardworking and innately conservative wheat farmers of the district that included Russell County. In all, Dole served four terms in the House, fighting for the farmers and opposing the social-reform programs of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, although he did vote for the landmark civil rights bills. Dole's witty and zealous partisanship caught the admiring eye of Jerry Ford, then the minority leader.